Carmine Galante was born on February 21, 1910 in an East Harlem tenement. His parents had immigrated to New York from Castellammare del Golfo, where his father had been a fisherman. Galante soon began walking the wrong path and his first arrest came in 1924 for stealing trinkets from a store counter, but as he was still a juvenile, the actual charge is not recorded in his police file; he was sent to reform school as an 'incorrigible defendant.' But there are subsequent charges showing, for crimes ranging from petty larceny to grand larceny, assault, robbery and homicide. In 1926, he served a prison term for second-degree assault and robbery. In early 1930, he was arrested in connection with the murder of a police officer during a payroll robbery, but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. On December 25, 1930 Galante and 3 of his friends were sitting in a car when they were approached by a police detective, the detective had his gun drawn. The 3 men including Galante fired at the detective and after that ran off. All but one got away, Galante had slipped and fell and the detective managed to grab him and knock him out. At police headquarters, he was, apparently, worked over by a group of tough detectives and received a brutal beating. He was subsequently identified as one of a group of four men who had robbed the Liebman Brewery in South Brooklyn. He never confessed to the crime or revealed the identity of the other men involved and, on being found guilty, was sent to Sing-Sing prison, where he served time until he was paroled in May 1939.
At his release he was considered a 'stand up' guy and his career had finally really begun. In January 1945, he married his childhood sweetheart, Helen Marulli, in the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows on Pitt Street. By the 1950’s, he had risen through the ranks of the Bonanno family, progressing from being the driver and bodyguard of the boss to the position of capo. His ferocity and cunning were matched by his driving ambition to one day control the Bonanno family. Throughout the 1950’s, he consolidated his power and position. In addition to opening up and expanding the Canadian arm of the family through his Montreal connections, he made the visit to Sicily where he met up with Bonanno for the summit meeting in Palermo with the Sicilian Mafia. In October 1956, he travelled to Binghamton in upstate New York, staying at the Arlington Hotel along with Frank Garofalo, John Bonventre, and Joseph "Joe Beck" Di Palermo of New Jersey. Also at the hotel that night were Joseph Bonanno and Joe Barbera. Whatever else this meeting was about, there had to have been drugs on the agenda. Di Palermo was one of the ace drug traffickers operating out of the crime family now run by Tommy Lucchese. Galante also travelled to Miami and Cuba in 1958 to confer with French, American and Canadian drug traffickers. In his travels outside of America, he had no language difficulties, as he was fluent in French and Spanish in addition to several Italian dialects.
On July 9, an indictment was handed down accusing Vito Genovese and fourteen co-defendants (including Galante) with masterminding an international narcotics syndication that had smuggled heroin and cocaine into the USA from Cuba, Puerto Rico and Mexico. Galante ran and managed to avoid arrest and remained on the run until 1959. In May 1960, while on bail for this indictment, he was again charged, along with twenty-nine other people, with narcotics conspiracy. He was finally tracked down and arrested in Seaside Heights, New Jersey and remanded to prison. His first appearance in court ended in a mistrial when the foreman of the jury mysteriously fell down a flight of stairs in an abandoned building and broke his back. In the 1962 retrial, there was chaos and confusion when one of the defendants, Anthony Mirra, an upcoming associate of the Bonanno family and a man equally as viscous and unstable as Galante, picked up a heavy wooden chair and threw it at the prosecutor. Others, screamed and shouted throughout the proceedings, but of the twenty-nine, thirteen were found guilty. Galante was one of them, receiving a twenty-year prison sentence.
He served his time at Lewisburg Penitentiary in G Block, the maximum-security wing, which was known as Mafia Row because of all the organized crime figures who were incarcerated there. His life was boring, but not unpleasant. He worked in the prison hot house raising plants and looked after his three pet cats, an unheard of luxury in any prison, least of all a federal penitentiary. He paid the prison butcher $250 a month to provide the best meat cuts to the Bonanno family members who were serving time with him. Galante ruled the block; everyone lived by "Lillo’s Law." He settled all the disputes, and permitted no fighting, no arguments and no liquor. G Block was considered the toughest block in the prison, but it was also the best run, a testament to the awesome power Galante could exercise. He was a man who could not tolerate losing arguments or being humiliated. He even intimidated the prison guards. It was once said that Galante would go up to the hardened black prisoners waiting in line and tell them to "get the fuck out the way, niggers."
Galante was paroled on January 23, 1974, after serving twelve years of his sentence. Back in New York, he resumed his life of crime. He was ready to assume the leadership of the Bonanno family and become the dominant mobster in New York. To make a point, within two days of release from prison, he ordered the bronze doors on the tomb in Greenwood Cemetery of Frank Costello, who had died in 1973, to be blown to bits with a time bomb. He had also threatened to do some dire things to Carlo Gambino, who he hated passionately for his part in the Commission’s decision to overthrow Joseph Bonanno. Each day a bodyguard would drive him to L & T Cleaners on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan’s Little Italy district. This was his business headquarters. At times, he would also use his favourite daughter, Nina, to act as his driver as he visited his contacts across New York. He was particularly fond of her, and according to evidence that emerged from the famous Commission case, he may well have had a wistful dream of uniting the Bonanno and Colombo crime families through a marriage between his daughter and Alphonse Persico, son of Carmine "The Snake" Persico, the boss of the Colombo family. It was claimed that Galante wanted to make Nina the first ever female 'button man' or made Mafia member.
As Galante walked the streets of Little Italy, people would approach him and bow in obeisance, or lightly touch his arm in respect. His 'manna' and presence were enormous, according to the New York police who were keeping him under surveillance. Bald, bespectacled and with a stooped walk, he hardly resembled the image of a feared underworld mob boss. He had worked hard at keeping fit throughout his prison sentence and on his release would go jogging most days along East River Drive. His involvement with narcotics continued, irrespective of the fact that it had cost him his freedom for the last twelve years. He was one of the country’s most consecrated and rapacious drug dealers, and was reported to be the inventor of 'the black man test' an allegedly infallible experiment devised to ascertain the purity of heroin. A black addict would be kidnapped and injected with a "double-bag"; if he became comatose within a specified time, the narcotic was judged to be the correct purity.
On August 28, 1973, Natale Evola, the current boss of the family, died of natural causes; he had been ill with cancer for months. He was replaced by Philip "Rusty" Rastelli. As far as Galante was concerned, Rastelli’s promotion was purely temporary, but Rusty liked being the boss and resisted Galante’s overtures and threats, until his stepson, James Fernandes was shot dead on a Brooklyn Street. He got the message loud and clear then, and stepped aside.
Galante was busy in his months in and out of prison building up a network and liasing with the senior members of the other crime families in New York and across the country. He travelled to Florida and, on one occasion in August 1975, Los Angeles, meeting up with a mobster and discussing business on the go-carts at Disneyland. On Labour weekend 1976, he organized a meeting at his daughter’s home in Hampton Bays, Long Island. Among those attending was Russell A. Bufalino, the Mob boss of Northeast Pennsylvania. In 1977, Galante was returned to prison for parole violation; he had been caught on surveillance meeting with known criminals. By March 23 1979 he was free on $50,000 bail and back on the streets. The rest of the New York Mob bosses watched with trepidation as Galante moved deeper and deeper in the drug trade. He had set up a network of Sicilians to replace and operate the supply lines that had been broken by the police success in smashing the "French Connection" drug rings. He had the strength of his "Zips" the tough, young, hard Sicilian hoodlums he had been importing and settling in and around Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. They were his right arm, soldiers and bodyguards when needed. Earlier immigrants called them Zips because they spoke the native language so fast. According to Vincent Teresa, these men were recruited for one thing: to bring back respect and honour in the Honoured Society. "These Sicilian Mafiosi will run into a wall," he said, "put their head in a bucket of acid for you if they’re told to, not because they’re hungry but because they’re disciplined. They have been brought up from birth over there to show respect and honour, and that’s what these punks over here don’t have. Once they’re told to get someone, that person hasn’t a chance."
The Zips should have been Galante's final insurance for power, and the final thing he needed to become the boss of bosses in New York but in the Mafia things never work the way you expect them to work.....
On Thursday, July 12, 1979 Carmine Galante decided to have a nice lunch at "Joe and Mary Italian-American Restaurant" and to meet with some friends of his. Galante was not alone, he had 2 of his zips with him for protection. Around 3 pm a four-door blue Mercury Montego, registration 270 NYU, pulled up outside the restaurant and double-parked in the narrow two-way street. The driver, a red-striped ski mask covering his face, stepped out. He was hefting a .3030 M1 carbine. Three men, also wearing ski masks, left the car and jogged into the building. Within seconds the nice restaurant turned into a warzone when the smoke cleared Galante was found wedged between the garden wall and the dining table, his head cocked over, his right handing resting on his hip, and a cigar shot to pieces but still clenched between his dead lips. On his left wrist, his Cartier watch was still ticking. On the table, a half finished lettuce and tomato salad, some rolls, a peach and a half-empty carafe of red wine were standing on the floral-pattern tablecloth. One like it, from an adjoining table, would later be used to cover Galante’s corpse. His 2 zip bodyguards left the scene unscatched they knew what had happened and had not been able to do anything about it.
There had been rumours of an impending hit on Galante for over two years. Like the man he killed thirty-six years earlier on the streets of Manhattan, he had many enemies. When someone asked him about the risk of assassination, he boasted, “No one will ever kill me, they wouldn’t dare.” He was so wrong. The instrument of his ambition, the “Zips,” the men he had encouraged and nurtured within the Bonanno family, became the instrument of his destruction. It had never apparently occurred to Galante that the best bodyguards also make the best killers. After the autopsy, Galante’s body was laid out in Chapel B on the second floor of the Provenzano-Lanza Funeral Home on Second Avenue on the Lower East Side, and he was buried on July 17 at Saint John’s Cemetery in Queens. It was a small funeral; only fifty-nine mourners attended, including Helen Marulli, Nina in a black dress and Galante’s lawyer, the infamous Roy Cohen. At the graveside, the priest pronounced that he would leave “judgement to God,” as Nina placed a red rose on her beloved father’s coffin.
Why Galante was killed and who was behind the murder will, of course, remain a mystery, at least in terms of actual certainty. Although, in one of the very rare exceptions to the rule, someone was eventually tried and convicted of the murder. Most sources agree that Galante had become a pain and source of embarrassment to the rest of the New York Mafia. He was also, apparently, determined to take control of the heroin trafficking industry, utilising his “Zips” to act as his mules and for muscle and support. It had been a collective decision of the Commission to remove him. Philip Rastelli had been consulted in his prison cell, and some say even Joseph Bonanno was approached in Arizona for his approval. A meeting was allegedly held at Boca Raton in Florida, attended by Santo Trafficante, Paul Castellano and Frank Tieri among others. Jerry Catena, the retired Genovese master hood, was apparently brought out of retirement in case the killing misfired and damage control would be needed to avert a full-scale mob war. Less than one hour after the hit went down, NYPD surveillance cameras in Mulberry Street, Little Italy, recorded three senior members of the Bonanno family meeting with Aniello Dellacroce, the powerful underboss of the Gambino family. They were joined by Bruno Indelicato (picture on the left), a twenty-three-year-old soldier in the Bonanno family, hot and dishevelled, but obviously jubilant about something. The group greeted each other warmly and then moved into the Ravenite, Dellacroce’s social club. What the police were recording that day was probably the only known film of a Mafia conspiracy, or at least part of it. Indelicato’s palm print was found on the getaway car, as was also the handprint of another known mobster, Santo Giordano. He was subsequently killed in a plane crash in 1983 before being brought to justice, but Indelicato was arrested, tried in the Commission case and convicted of Galante’s murder. On November 19, 1986, he was sentenced to forty years in prison. The other two men involved in the shoot-out were never identified.
Created with Source: The Crime Library